How a nothing journalist from Miami, who was run out of town for plagiarism, ends up in Dubai as a publicist for a drug dealer who is brother to the Afgan president is a great story that will unfortunately never be told.

I can't remember where I read the big analysis of his social circle.. Maybe NSFWCorp or Exiledonline. Was Mark Ames, I'm confident.

Gosh people!! REad a book!! Forget the conspiracy theories. he is the heriditary leader of the largest Pushtun tribe. His father was the leader and and opposed the establishment of Al-queda bases in AFghanistan. Karzai's father was murdered , live on t.v. by Al-Queda by a "camera man". this touched off rioting and protests accross the country. Karzai was in India at the time, he then walked back into Afghanistan to lead resistance to the Taliban.

As bad as he is it would be impossible to rule Afghanistan without his tribes backing. So he is what isavailable. There just is no comparable figure. he is what Nato.the U.S. are stuck with. Who knows whose pocket he is in. perhaps the Russians, maybe the Indians, the pakistani's , maybe the Chinese . theyare all players in the game.

There are claims that he is descended from Alexander the Great.
. Many groups in the tribe grow opium, His brother does not control the opium supply nor does he attempt to suppress it. He is a powerful person in the tribe he is not an opium dealer, that is just propaganda from the Taliban and Pakistani secret service

Rollo, I think you conflated 3 different anti taliban fighters into one. The guy who was killed by the camera guy was Ahmed Shah Masud, the leader of the Tajiks, not Pashtun. The guy who walked back in was an older tribal leader who was killed in short order. As far as I know, we brought Karzai back in.

Rollo, I think you conflated 3 different anti taliban fighters into one. The guy who was killed by the camera guy was Ahmed Shah Masud, the leader of the Tajiks, not Pashtun. The guy who walked back in was an older tribal leader who was killed in short order. As far as I know, we brought Karzai back in.

Yup.

Quote:

The source for his brother being a major drug dealer and living untouched in Dubai is the Washington Post.

1999, Karzai's father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was gunned down as he was coming home from a mosque in the city of Quetta. Reports suggest that the Taliban carried out the assassination.[1]

Ahmed Shah Massoud

They were finally granted an interview. During the interview, they set off a bomb composed of explosives hidden in the camera and in a battery-pack belt. Commander Massoud died in a helicopter that was taking him to a military field hospital in nearby Tajikistan

both from wikipedia. The interview assassination was Ahmed massoud.
Abdul Haq is the dude who walked in and got himself killed.

Anyways here is the relevent passge, it's kind of interesting to see a bit about his younger days.

"More recently, I came to know Hamid Karzai, a thirty-year-old Kandahar native and spokesman for Mojadidi's Afghan National Liberation Front. Hamid was the son of Abdulahad Karzai, the khan (headman) of the Popalzai tribe, the branch of the Abdalis that produced Ahmad Shah Durrani. With Abdul Haq, Hamid Karzai represented for me all that was larger than life in the Afghan character. He was tall and clean-shaven, with a long nose and big black eyes. His thin bald head gave him the look of an eagle. Wearing a sparkling white shalwar kameez, he affected the dignity, courtly manners, and high breeding for which the Popalzai are known throughout Afghanistan. Hamid, unlike the crowd at NIFA [= National Islamic Front of Afghanistan], whose royalist sentiments and moderate politics he shared, was not a "Gucci muj[ahidin]." When he did wear Western dress, he preferred conservative blazers and slacks or a leather jacket. He moved between the Occidental and Oriental worlds without pretension or falsity. I remember him in his Peshawar villa, sitting on a carpet in a shalwar kameez, speaking Pukhtu [sic] with his turbaned Kandahari kinsmen, a copy of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss nearby. Hamid was one of six sons, but the only one who had not gone into exile in Europe or North America and who aspired to succeed his father as head of the Popalzai.

Throughout his childhood, Hamid had resented the restrictions placed on him as the son of one of Afghanistan's most important men. He longed to escape Kandahar and the stifling routine of tribal ceremonies. He wanted to serve his country, but only as a diplomat living abroad in the West. His first shock and humiliation came as a student in India in 1979, when officials at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi informed him that the Taraki regime had imprisoned his father. A few months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. "I suddenly realized how spoiled I was," Hamid told me. "I realized that I had been consciously rejecting all the things that were really important and now were lost."

A few months later, in 1980, Hamid visited a refugee camp near Quetta. As soon as he entered the camp, hundreds of Popalzai tribesmen gathered around him, smiling. "They thought that just because I was the khan's son, I had the power to help them. I felt ashamed, because I knew I was just a naive student who was spending his college years thinking only of himself and his ambition. I was not what they thought I was. My goal from that moment on was to become the man that those refugees thought I was. To become a man like my father."

The man that Hamid Karzai became was one who never tired of talking about the rich history of his tribe and the region of Kandahar. The story of the founding of the Popalzai--first told to me by Hamid--sounds like one of the archetypal tales in the Book of Genesis.

Abdal, the patriarch of the Abdalis (later the Durranis), died at the age of 105 and was succeeded by Rajar, who in turn passed over his oldest son and picked the younger but smarter Zirak to be headman. Zirak ruled for many years and had four sons. One day, near Kandahar, the family was breaking camp. By then Zirak was over 100 and too old even to move, let alone saddle his horse. He asked his oldest son, Barak, for help. Barak laughed and made fun of his father. The second son, Alik, did the same. The third son, Musa, told his father to get on a horse and follow him. When Zirak was not able, Musa kicked him and told him he must remain behind until the beasts devoured him. Popal, the youngest son, offered to carry his father on his back. Old Zirak never forgot the incident, and when he died at the age of 120, he invested Popal as head of the clan. Thus it was that Popal founded his own branch of the Abdali tribe.

The mythic, elemental quality of the story is enhanced by the fact that, though the origin of the Popalzai is relatively recent--the late fifteenth century--nobody can accurately date when the events took place. It is such stories that, stylistically at least, lend credence to the notion that the Pathans are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. True or not, one could at least say that the desert surrounding Kandahar was to the Pathans what the wilderness of Sinai was to the Hebrews: the seed-ground where an assemblage of tribes grew into a nation. To Hamid Karzai, Kandahar was "the home of our original Afghan culture, the genuine Afghanistan.""